


Medea

by chell-surname-redacted (failsafe)



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Dystopia, Future, Gen, Modern, scifi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 18:11:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/failsafe/pseuds/chell-surname-redacted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An attempt at a glimpse into the mind of a modern Medea. On an Earth in contact with the stars but recovering from war against itself, a woman must choose what is best for her children when she believes their father to have a greater love of diplomacy and peacemaking than for them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Medea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ceitean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceitean/gifts).



The wars on Earth raged for ten years.

Some states prospered, others fell into ruin.

Those that fell were at the mercy of those that grew up from the wars, disease, corruption. Many were born because so many others starved. Some were saved, enslaved in the name of peace.

Medea had been lucky.

She was beautiful.

She was beautiful, so when the tanks rolled in and made the streets seem so small, she was among the first to be sent out—beautiful young men and women, full-faced, bright-eyed children with just enough dirt on their unwashed faces to draw pity rather than revulsion.

It was a nasty, corrupt business, and all of them knew it, but the wars had gone on long enough. They all knew how to play the game.

 

***

 

She had thought he was different.

She saw him—cartoon spaceman in body armor—step down from the armored vehicle and draw his filtered visor up without waiting for any scans to tell him the air was clear. He trusted her people more than she did. He looked at the children first, and she had believed he trusted that the cowering officials who had anticipated the inevitability of their fall would not send their unprotected young out into poison air. Looking down at the glittery tatters of her scant clothing, she had no such faith.

He approached a child and Medea approached him. Closer, she could see the tired youth in his eyes, his sandy-rust hair too full to have spent much time beneath heavy gear.

They made a funny triangle, closing fast together. The schoolchild the young man moved to investigate. Medea moved toward the first thing she saw that might offer some hope that wasn't also itself horror. The schoolchild saw her, saw something familiar, and ran until he caught on her clothes and hid himself behind her.

She slowed when the child reached her, her hand shielding his temple and drawing the other side of his face to her waist. She'd only slowed down because he was coming now, toward them both.

That child still hadn't survived the war.

 

***

 

Peace came. It came like an anesthetic blanket. The war machines were stilled, waiting. Medea's fingers worked through the dark silk strands of her little daughter's long hair. She wrapped them around one another, patterns emerging in a mesh of slender braids, forming a cap over the rest of the length of her hair, far more delicate than the overlapping mesh of metal that supported the plush bed.

“Mommy?”

“Yes, little one?”

“Where's my Daddy?”

Hers. This world of sterile white and cold metal, fenced in gardens that were accessible only during set schedules of operation, this was the world her daughter had been born into. It was better than the alternative. She wasn't sure her daughter had ever really belonged to her as much as to that.

“Your Daddy has gone to talk some very important people,” she said, tying off the last of the braids and letting her fingers fall and fold into her own lap.

“Why does he go away so much?”

“He goes away because there are people who would like to start the fighting again—the fighting that happened just before you were born, the fighting that was still happening when your brother was a baby.”

“When he was sick?”

“Yes, when he was sick.”

 

***

 

The baby boy at her breast had screamed, pleaded for her aid, almost relentlessly during his waking hours for weeks. Then his screaming all but ceased. Instead, he coughed, sneezed, and spit up most of what he managed to swallow mingled with yellowed phlegm.

No baby should be born to be brought up among the spoils of war, among people like her, but it was the cost of her survival. Even the invaders respected a woman carrying a child of their own, but now he wasn't sheltered in her womb and had other needs. Looking down at him, seeing paler, fresher skin than her own, Medea had thought it was worth it. Jason was a good man among them and certainly no worse than the best among those from home—those who would have blinked at sending her off as offering to save her country.

He would have to be a good man now.

She carried her child in the crook of one arm, batting aside the heavy curtain that hid his father from her. She did not so much as give herself pause to see the disapproval of his superiors—everything here was an invasion and she would not fear turning it around for the sake of her son.

“His crying stopped,” she said pointedly, nodding down to the child. Her eyes lingered on his pale lips and she steeled herself against fear. She had seen so many children die, known so many children to step out of sight and never come back. Not hers.

“Medea,” Jason said, rushing over to her side. The dark gray-blue of his uniform made their son look even paler in contrast as Medea held him out to Jason. He hesitated, but she didn't let him stop her. He was his infant, too.

“You know what it means.”

“He's just tired from being colic-y. Maybe he's getting better.”

“If you think he'll be better out of your hands,” she snapped. “You know what you must do now. Your people need medicines, but your son will die without them.”

She knew he ought to resist her, but as she watched him consider the frail body of his own child, she saw the reason he had been her way out. He couldn't let his own child die when he'd been so ready to save children so insignificant as to not even be counted the enemy.

 

***

  
  
There had been cameras there when the last dose had been administered, back in Jason's home city—this place of secure facilities and public parks. Medea had laced it with honey so their child would swallow it, tinging it yellow, liquid gold falling onto her baby boy's tongue while he was held steady in her arms. For years, it had been counted as the beginning of the end, but the war had not ended. Ceasefire happened only when the borders of those nations powerful enough to continue brushed against one another, even over sea—continued attacks were suicide in every direction, but that did not manufacture peace.

 

***

  
  
“Hey, Mom—“ Medea's son rushed into the room, hitting the door shoulder-first.

“Walk, don't run. You're inside.”

“But—Anyway, Dad is back.”

“Daddy!” her daughter exclaimed, bracing herself against Medea's knee to get up from where she sat in the center of the bed, to get her little bare feet down onto the metal floor. She hissed a little as she touched down, wobbled over to slip cloth shoes with rubbery soles onto her feet. She had never known the kind of ground Medea had walked barefoot enough to have natural callouses that protected her from the piercing feeling of the artificial cool.

“Walk,” Medea ordered again as she moved to follow her children, a faint smile playing on her lips.

 

***

  
  
“You'd go?”

“Medea, do I really have a choice?”

“I'd finish raising them here, on my own. They'd be my age by the time you got back, Jason.”

“... If they have our grandchildren waiting for me when I get back, the world will be better for all of them. You knew this had to happen. Colonization, trade, it's the only way for this planet to heal. It's a lot faster than it used to be. I'll... see them again.”

The smile that played on Medea's lips was the kind of thing that temporarily stayed the burning in her eyes, the kind of expression she turned her back on Jason to keep him from seeing. Her eyes fell on the opened file down on the tabletop's surface. She brushed a finger delicately across, turning a page. He still didn't think she could really understand—after all, no one among the _conquered_ understood the science that had taken their land, their lives from them—so he took her wrist.

“But not me,” the sudden contact drew from her lips. It had never been her, and it wouldn't be her children either—put the children of _another world_ in his reach and he would run to their fresh faces and forget the little girl who'd been so eager to see them, the son who made him a hero in the eyes of the world because he'd been such a sick little baby.

“Medea, we're young. You don't—“

But she did know. She jerked her wrist away from him, but in nearly the same motion she leaned up onto her toes to peck her lips against his cheek. Maybe he was a better person than her as they would all have her believe.

“I understand. I have a headache,” she told him. It gave her every reason to go where she knew she had to next.

 

***

  
This time there was no honey, not dropper filled with gold. Instead, there were two full phials of clear liquid. She'd sent for the children first, knowing that when their father had finished playing with them in the park that he would have other things to attend to. It had never been her.

_Not indicated for use on humans under **16** years. Do not use without legal perm—_

It didn't matter.

He might leave her, but he wouldn't leave them. She wouldn't let him.

 

***

  
  
“Mommy, I'm not sick.”

“I know, baby. This will just make you a little sleepy, and when you wake up from your nap, you can play with Daddy. It's okay.”

“Mom, you know I hate needles.”

“I know. If there was another way to do this, I would, but you're a big boy and it'll just take a second. I'll do yours first—show your sister it's not so bad?”

Her son's arm was in her reach then, offered, and she kissed the place she was about to dab with the sterilizing wipe. Maybe wherever they'd go after this would have fresh air that wouldn't make him sick, maybe he daughter would play on ground that wouldn't hurt her tender feet and would toughen them with time.

The medicine was in his bloodstream and she was moving quickly to kiss her daughter's arm too. She hoped they would remember.

“Can I go to bed, Mom? I'm... tired,” her son said, his eyelids already drooping and she took a moment to reach out and tap beneath his chin, to make him look at her so she could memorize the exact color of his eyes.

“Stay here with me and I'll tell you a story.”

“... 'Kay,” he agreed, curling to her left side. Her daughter moved to her right, put her little round cheek above her breast and she knew that even sooner she'd be sleeping, so still it wouldn't disturb the network of braids on her head. Medea swallowed hard kissed each of their heads once more and closed her own eyes. They'd have no choice but to put the children in cryo-chambers when they found them. They wouldn't awaken, wouldn't age, wouldn't breathe without assistance until it was out of their bodies. The dosage she'd given them was the one intended for Jason's voyage, and if they didn't take the children, they would die here in her arms.

She reached across to the pad beside the bed, pressed a little red button at the corner, then stroked her daughter's tiny shoulder as she saw it light up with briefly cracked-open eyelids. She wouldn't have hours with them, a final night, but she could pretend. They'd be asleep before anyone got here.

“Once, before your grandmother was born, Earth made its first contact with the stars. It was before the wars, before—“

It was the beginning of a story she couldn't finish. She didn't know the rest of it, but they would, someday and far away.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed this! The choppy, somewhat less-than-linear style was an attempt to blend a more modern prose style with the mode of recounting a myth. I kind of confused myself with it. I chose not to include Jason's jilting Medea for another woman in this version because I feel that was not necessarily the point of Medea's sense of betrayal on a basic thematic level, and I thought it might be nice to have the reasoning be less rooted in the idea that all women are motivated only by romantic love or lack thereof or some other secondary facet of sexuality. Happy yuletide!


End file.
